Job title: Managing Director, Product
Seniority: Senior
Salary: Competitive
Location: London, flexible working
The company
At Lightful, we believe that those doing the greatest good deserve the best technology.
We’re passionate about making the best technology accessible to charities and nonprofits. Our products and custom solutions help organisations unleash the power of technology and make the good work they do even greater. We’ve worked with the likes of Help Refugees, London’s Air Ambulance, Comic Relief, the Rhodes Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to name a few.
There are over 50 of us across the team, and we are now looking to add some key senior hires to our exceptional team.
We are building a product that helps build the digital capabilities of charities and other good causes. We know there are challenges in finding time or resources to learn and implement social and digital best practice to raise more support, awareness or funds, and we want to help great causes strengthen relationships with their supporters.
The social media management platform currently helps hundreds of users from small and medium sized charities to plan their social media posts, collaborate with colleagues and learn what works. This sits alongside a learning hub to support the learning and implementation of best practice across social and digital.
The role
We are looking to hire an experienced leader who will bring together multiple functions around development, product and growth in order to help the product’s evolution and scale-out.
Through your leadership, you will build a culture of high performance and accountability. You will be a member of the company’s management team and will report directly to the CEO, and work closely with the company’s co-founders and board. Whilst directing and supporting a talented team, you will also form an important part of the extended leadership team that works across all areas of Lightful’s business.
With previous experience in driving cross-functional teams to successfully reach product, engineering and revenue outcomes, you need to have the technical and commercial know-how to make the right products in the right way – managing the “how”, as well as the “what”.
We pride ourselves on being vibrant, trusting and a cross-functional team. A high degree of empathy with end-user needs – those of charities, beyond profits and organisations across the third sector – is at the centre of the work we do, so we’re looking for someone who is motivated by making a product which will make a major difference to our customers and how they can, in turn, generate more impact.
Every company may say this in a job ad, but we mean it: this is a genuinely unique opportunity to lead different areas of a growing business with an exceptionally talented team and leave your mark on a sector that exists to make the world a better place.
Diversity is very important to us, especially as a tech company. We particularly welcome applications from candidates from groups currently underrepresented in tech.
Lightful Values
Lightful’s Values are integral to our culture:
- To act with audacity while remembering humility
- To understand the importance of both listening and leadership
- To practice generosity whilst showing accountability
- These all lay on the foundation of respect and integrity
As a true values-holder, your role will have a number of key accountabilities:
Accountabilities
- Collaborate across disciplines to set and deliver a clear, cohesive product strategy for the company, and balance it with room to source and test exciting new opportunities
- Support your team of approximately twenty cross-disciplinary professionals, to set clear goals and key results, regularly check in on progress, learn and adjust course when needed
- Help your teams to set hypotheses, test the riskiest assumptions and break down complex problems into small steps
- Reduce dependencies, remove blockers and co-ordinate with other teams and stakeholders
- Work with the Co-Founders and CEO to create a structure that implements best-practice approaches and operational thinking at scale
- Actively support the marketing team through product exhibitions, conference presentations, meetings, and events
- You’ll work on business decisions, meaning you’ll think strategically about how we make smart, sometimes scrappy product decisions (in order to support rapid learning and iteration culture important at a start-up)
- Be accountable for the performance of product KPIs, and hold your team accountable
- Be the champion for agile practices and ensure the development team is working effectively
- Join the dots between development and growth, ensuring product marketing is aligned with the product roadmap
- Advocate user centred design and modern user experience discovery practices, to ensure we’re building products that solve actual user problems
- Keep current with updates in development processes and tools, working closely with the team to ensure our tech stack remains efficient, robust, innovative and scalable
Experience
Leadership
- You have an demonstrable track-record of directly leading successful software products from concept to adoption, with experience in all stages of the product life cycle and during rapid growth
- Exceptional experience of line management, professional development and individual and team growth across product, technical, and growth team leads
- You have an empathetic leadership style and you build strong, effective relationships
- You can clearly and inspirationally communicate a vision, and help your team keep the prize in mind
- Comfortable talking to senior leaders and C-suite executives, you convey confidence and credibility in your strategy and approach
Approach
- You know when to employ different approaches to product management, and can balance lean-style MVP experimental work with focused iteration
- You’re metrics-obsessed and understand how product changes might impact our goals
- You understand the power and value of world-class design, and the value of an authentic brand in shaping a product that users genuinely love
- You have a very strong technical knowledge to support, understand and enable your development team’s software needs and challenges
- You have experience in growth marketing and enterprise sales, and can decide when to do a scrappy manual process and when you need a tool to scale something that’s working
Skills
- You are able to balance the responsibilities of product ownership with dev team accountability and product growth, analytics and reach. You will be comfortable working with all parts of the business, from talent and HR, finance and Labs, and demonstrate Lightful’s Values at all times
- Solid understanding of key SaaS metrics including MRR, Churn, LTV, CAC, ARPU, and how these metrics impact one another
- You get the enterprise SaaS sales approach and can balance product delivery with strategic sale demands
- Experience in rapid product discovery and managing a UX team to get specific, validated insights quickly based on customer problems
- Clear and concise written skills with an ability to distill and communicate complex topics
- A passion for the nonprofit and ‘beyond profit’ sector – ideally with both professional and personal experience
Delivery - Helping to set, and deliver on, key financial and impact targets for the product’s success
- Working directly with a Sales team on selling a product to enterprise or SME customers
- Experience of working in ambiguity, and bringing clarity and context when it is needed
- Strong understanding of modern development techniques and tools
- A strong commercial track-record and excitement in the P&L ownership of building what works, and what scales
- You are comfortable holding people to account and working to improve standards if they fall short
Benefits
You will be a part of our exciting culture that fosters personal growth and development. As we expand, you will be given the opportunity to thrive in a close-knit team environment.
- Amazing office in Second Home Spitalfields, London
- Free coffee, tea, fruit and treats in the office
- Competitive salary
- Comprehensive benefits package
- Free gym membership, yoga and meditation
- Cycle to work scheme
- Childcare vouchers
- Bespoke development programme
- Stock options – every team member shares in the success of Lightful